Tag Archive: NaNo finished

…and I have officially crossed into the winner’s circle of NaNo, at 50317 words. And the goofy thing is that I still want to write tonight because I’m about to send a group of characters off on Final Rollicking Action Adventure Sequence, but it’s five til two in the morning and I really do need to be showered and at work in 9 hours.

But I’m done with the wordcount goal for the month and my fingers are typing at light speed and my brain is sort of overdoing everything right now, so I thought I’d reflect on the whole thing for a moment before throwing myself on my pillow.

To my writing buddies and supportive friends: I heart you guys so much it’s craycray. I promise I’ll be around a bit more now that the deadlines have backed off.

The biggest, happiest surprise in all of this NaNoing silliness was that most of the time, this wasn’t as hard as it was last year. I feel a lot more comfortable writing, much more comfortable in particular with dialogue. And writing 2500 words in a day suddenly doesn’t feel like a monumentous, impossible task. Right now it feels like Thursday, and I love that. I love that my brain can reach into itself and AssPull something completely insane when I need to keep going and need something to heighten the tension.

Or at least I love that my brain has been doing that for the last few days, when I realized that all told the story structure is starting to shape up alright but that I’m making everything far, far too easy for Miss Aurora and that I need to work on making her life more difficult. So I started doing that, and I ended up with a scene that has, you know, something like a gesture towards “oh yeah, suspense!” rather than just a bunch of teenage angsting. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some angst way more than is rational, but a book full of nothing but angst would be Twilight would suck. So adding much in the way of suspense will be issue number one when I start editing. Or maybe issue number two, falling in line right after culling redundant conversations.

In other words, I have a metric ton of editing to do, and I’m well, well aware of it.

But first I have to finish this thing. The wordcount goal is done, but the story is not, and I can’t begin editing anything until I know exactly where this thing ends. Then I can piece the structure together better and see what happens.

And part of me would dearly love to have Aurora randomly know karate, but I don’t know if that would fit, and it would just be too convenient for her to have serious martial arts skills. She may have to stick with the week’s worth of self-defense lessons I let her have at one point.

Story and novel aside, I haven’t gotten nearly as much blogging done as I’d like on either blog – here because most of the time I’d rather be writing the novel, and on my beer blog because I haven’t spent as much time trying new beers, much less throwing together some form of coherent thought about what I have consumed. This is also why I’m sitting on a few-day-old review of last week’s homework wine. I’m not really coherent. But that’s normal for me. And given my drinking habits have been normal, my caffeine intake has been only ever so slightly increased (by which I mean I’ve probably had two cups of coffee more this month than I normally do), and my procrastination levels were actually less than they normally are, I’m going to say that this was a rousing success, and that writing doesn’t suck.

I mean, my writing sucks, at least right now. Because it’s unedited.

But. It’s fun.

I can tell I’ve been writing a ton lately because this is getting way wordsy. I’m going to haul my rear end to bed right now and hopefully pass out without the characters screaming at me that I need to get up and work on scene x for a while because they have more to say to each other and ONOES TEH ANGST. But I doubt that’ll happen. They don’t really like leaving me alone.